Design

Shining a Light Across the ALM Spectrum

Gartner's 2011 MarketScope for Application Life Cycle Management report has ranked 20 top ALM vendors according to the various phases of the ALM spectrum and highlighted which vendors are excelling in their respective areas of expertise. The analyst house says that ALM solutions today are evolving to enable enhanced planning, measurement, control, and reporting of activities in all the stages of all the various application delivery life cycles.

While initial solutions were single-vendor conglomerations, ALM products have largely evolved to become more open and to coordinate a wider scope of activities. As such, the report shows that, "ALM suites have promised improved automation and integrated approaches to the delivery of applications, but often fall short of the vision."

While most enterprises have made investments in tools and processes that support the various phases of ALM, the siloed nature of these tools has made it difficult to treat software delivery as a business process, with end-to-end visibility, metrics and intelligence. Serena Software is one company that scored well in the Gartner report due to its tool's ability to provide a set of applications that software organizations can use to manage core business processes, streamline workflows, leverage valuable talent and exploit existing infrastructure.

Serena says that its methodology of flowing work and insight to developers, analysts, executives, operations managers, and everyone else involved in the application lifecycle has proven to be effective for more than 3,000 active enterprise customers around the world.

"With this MarketScope, we believe Gartner has acknowledged the need for solutions that can help organizations manage the entire process of delivering applications," said David Hurwitz, senior VP of marketing at Serena Software. "Gartner’s definition of ALM maps closely to the vision and strategy that Serena has been executing against, and we believe our positive rating reaffirms our commitment to delivering innovative and effective solutions to the industry."

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